Workflow and business processes are critical to the daily operations of most enterprises. In fact, enterprises have increasingly attempted to automate their daily operations in an effort to streamline expenses and reduce product or service time to market. These operations are often referred to as tasks associated with a workflow. Each task has a number of inter-task dependencies, such that a particular task may require that other tasks be completed before that particular task can be addressed. A product or service release may entail traversing many tasks within an enterprise before the product or service is actually released.
One problem associated with workflow processing is that it is often static in nature. In other words, when a workflow or set of tasks are being monitored, the users that can assist in handling the tasks are predetermined and known in advance. So, if a particular user is offline when a workflow begins processing then that user may not be considered as a candidate to assist in tasks of the resource should the user subsequently come on line and be available. This is can be a significant issue in dynamic and chaotic environments, where users log in to and out of their enterprise's systems with increasing regularity. Thus, the true nature of the enterprise's environment is not capable of being properly reflected and handled with traditional workflow processing.
Another problem associated with workflow processing is security. Intruders are becoming more and more adept at feigning the appearance of legitimate users in order to penetrate and comprise enterprise systems. As a result, enterprises have instituted a variety of security measures. Many workflow related security issues stem from the fact that an enterprise is diverse and includes operations over a large network. The various components of the workflow may have to interoperate across diverse environments; this flexibility also, unfortunately, presents many security challenges to ensure an intruder has not penetrated the workflow. Because of this, many enterprises have elected to keep workflow processing limited to a defined environment from which security can be more closely monitored and controlled. However, this limits the usefulness and desirability of workflow processing for many enterprises.
Still another problem occurs when a workflow spans multiple processing environments. Often to achieve interoperability, each processing environment needs to manage and maintain the software and data configuration used by a particular workflow system. This can create support and maintenance problems and can prevent some environments from being capable of participating in a workflow. Moreover, unless the workflow system itself is distributed, interoperability may not be practically achieved even with the best of integration plans.
Thus, what are needed are techniques, which allow for improved workflow processing.